The 20th century saw a great change in man's view of social organization. The main labels given to the new ideas were: socialism, communism, and collectivism. In retrospect, societies that adhered to these new ideas the most diligently were met with great disaster. It might be easy for us now to claim that those ideas lacked common-sense. But what exactly was their fundamental flaw? Is it not our responsibility to learn whatever we can from those mistakes, especially since the fall-out that precipitated from them was so severe and on such a massive scale? And if their flaws are obvious to us now, how is it possible that so many people did not see those flaws during their actual implementation? Was there something in the idea that was so deceptively attractive, that distracted people's attention away from inherit problems in the idea? How could this disparity, between the attractive falsehood and the hidden reality, been so large that millions would willingly march under its banner?
A post-mortem revels at least one thing very clearly: Marx incorrectly claimed that leaders added no value, only workers did. But obviously investors are needed to buy equipment for workers. And bosses are needed to make sure workers are doing tasks in unison, to the common goal of giving customers something they actually want. We might start with the question, how could such a simple misunderstanding have snow-balled into an open disregard for each other - an abandonment of honor amongst men? How could the larger picture have gotten lost so easily? We could say that people were replacing reason with emotions, which at least has the rather elegantly simple solution: be more rational, less emotional.
But is that the truth? Is our rational mind our only asset? Does communism's fall only teach us that our emotions were wrong, and that they're now never to be consulted? If this is the lesson learned (and certainly some in the modern world have drawn this conclusion), we would rightly claim that love is dead, and a calculating mind has taken its place as our rasion d'etre.
From my perspective, there were two factors in the early to mid 20th century led us to the current situation:
People to a small degree began to praise deceitfulness, and openly scorned honesty and reason. This, of course, has happened throughout all of history - as man has always been attracted to the seductive beauty & obvious short-term benefits of evil. And it is also apart of human nature to critique and doubt conventions, to be suspicious of purported wisdom from past generations.
But what was different in this case was the degree to which very old stables of wisdom came under question, and very vocally, from many different seemingly credible places. This upturn in rhetoric occurred right about the same time the 2nd factor hit.
Critical thinking is an essential skill for humans, to re-evaluate the situation, to incorporate the NEW into our existing knowledge: to suspect that the fundamental equation may have changed, and even very old axioms might be affected. Whether anything NEW had been discovered in this time period, whether there was a real reason to re-evaluate the OLD conventions, I cannot say. It certainly seems in retrospect that nothing NEW had been discovered, and this re-evaluation was pointless and very costly. But by itself, the re-evaluation could only be a minor setback - as long as we stick to objective truth, if after careful analysis of the facts, we deduce the original tenants still hold - then the only real damage was our time spent in getting back to them. But I think people believed they had in fact discovered something NEW: which was this 2nd factor below. It was a hypothesis put forth, and all old wisdom had to be revisited in the light of this new hypothesis. But unfortunately, it was the most subjective of hypothesis, one that people were unable (or unwilling) to test on its own ground. It was one they WANTED to believe, and through the wanting, it became an immobile axiom, of which all other truths had to adjust around.
People suggested it was our duty to love.
I am reminded of how this hypothesis still affects us even today. A very poor woman in town, who deservedly or not, has had many tragedies befall her and her family. I of course didn't know this person's true heart, but she seemed to be a genuine person, who was not lying about her tragedies, who had decided it would do her no good to exaggerate them. In my limited perception, she seemed a truly humble and sincere person. I believe God wants us to help those whose spirits are low. I think he wants us to do this even for people whose own actions might have caused their predicament. The extreme example is those who have deliberately harmed us - who may gloat for a time over the short term benefits of their evil, but eventually the true nature of their actions come home - and in a most strange reversal, when the dark realization brings them low and their spirits are in the depths - I think God wants us to be the one to go up to them and say, "Its alright. I forgive what you did to me." - and with a genuine smile, "I don't believe that you're hopeless."
People have the great power to restore each others spirit, and I think this is a gift God doesn't want us to leave idle.
But back to the poor woman; something else occurred - she began to ask for money from those who had befriended her. It even appeared that she might be fabricating stories over the reasons why she needed the money. If my initial impressions were true, then why would a genuine/sincere person do such a thing?
Recall that society openly claimed "it is our DUTY to love".
By this suggestion, those that would have otherwise dismissed the unsavory path of becoming deceitful, began to seriously consider it as a necessary means to an admirable end. Hadn't the poor woman noticed that those befriending her had a LOT more money then she did? Hadn't society told her that it was her RIGHT to lay claim to that money? The doorway to justifying deceit had been slightly nudged, and an otherwise good person began to take steps down that road.
Like all amorality, there is a strong natural tendency in man's being to employ it (one need only look at history, or walk out your door, or contemplate for a moment what it is to be human to understand this simple fact; we desire easy and quick solutions). In fact, amorality has only been kept at bay (in the small degrees where we can claim they have been kept at bay) by either the long history of denouncing it in all its forms, or the power of an individual's rational-mind to see the real outcome of evil. Any suggestion that an amoral path is in fact moral, will usually have the effect of swinging the door wide open; our pent-up desire retained by flimsy support beams would break and act like a flood gate. A moral path is a burden, and we only stay on them when we are absolutely sure they are the correct paths. Any hint that the burden is unnecessary is usually cause for most people to put down the load.
The end result was that love was no longer an act from an individual's heart, it was declared by the masses to be an individual's RESPONSIBILITY. A person's freedom of choice in the matter was removed, and from this, a contradiction was created. Love became bleeding and nothing else - it had lost its intrinsic hope. And without that it was no longer love. What some people very foolish failed to realize is that all acts of love contain hope. A giver has no claim to repayment. The giver is fully aware their actions could prove to be utterly vaporish. Yet they do hope, that their actions will bear fruit, something greater then what they had given in that moment of uncertainty.
The hope of love was always a difficult one to see, but now it had vanished altogether from the scene. Kindness was sneered at, because it was always deemed insufficient, short of the full measure. There was always some aspect of a giver's actions that could be thought of as selfish, that could be denounced as an ulterior motive. It was this "hope" aspect of love that was labeled a problem, and the modern mindset declared that it must be trimmed from a giver's heart in order to make a purer form of love. Those who took the claim "love is duty" the most seriously (or those who pretended too), became quite frustrated over the lack of purity in other people's actions (or at least, pretended to be frustrated). In the extreme, the frustration became compulsion, and whole societies were put under the whip, driving them forward to a noble end, to be closer to a purer form of love.
Of course, a whip can never make someone love. A whip can only control someone's actions and conscious mind. It never reaches, what we would call, their heart. Should the role instantly be reversed, and the whipped suddenly held the whip, then the now powerless reformer would tremble in great fear, because they're contradiction would be laid bare, they would not be able to hide any longer the knowledge of what they had known the whole time, that their actions never for one moment increased the sense of love in the other person. In fact they had known the complete opposite to be true; their actions bred hate in their victim.
Only in this extreme, the move towards compulsion, did people finally began to realize the contradiction at the root of the original idea: "a duty to love each other". But coupled with people's natural tendency for easy paths, and the active questioning of the conventional wisdom that these paths are to be avoided, the damage came full-circle. The gravest thing had occurred: love disappeared. It had been redefined as an unattainable chimera, and its original form (its true nature) was now gone completely from the scene. Kindness had been rendered a hopeless act in the eyes of many people.
But love is essentially eternal. The foolishness of an idea is always discovered in the end. And for many strong hearts, the dark eclipse was just love in it’s usually guise, a hope that is always slow to realize. To them, love had not in fact died; it had just gotten a little slower in bearing up its fruits. Kindness by necessity has to endure waiting, it must raise above frustration. Kindness must come from a steadfast heart.
In this regard, the hope in love itself will never die. The fruits of love may be absent from the scene for a very long time. But the hope in love itself, the faith of its eternal existence, will always be in the hearts of man. No matter how long the drought, men will believe that love exists, and that one day the world will see the visible return of its fruits again, even if they're own eyes do not get that privilege.
I know this probably seems very foolish to some people, that we should believe in an elusive concept; so ethereal & untestable. One has to wonder if we've abandoned reason & objective-truth by pursing such a costly enterprise without concrete facts. But don't these facts exist? For those that have walked through life with their eyes open, would they not inevitably see small hints of love's effect: the positive outcomes that coincide with people who bear uncertainty and continue to love through hardship?
Our minds seek understanding. We attempt to piece together the patterns that our world is so obviously filled with. I wrote this paper mainly for those who, like myself, are analytical and feel compelled to seek and believe in only purely rational and objective truths. To those people, my suggestion is to look for this most subtle of cause & effect relationships, the one human society long ago labeled as love. Dismiss the modern redefinition of that word, for that incarnation is a false one. Only look for love in its original ancient form. You cannot miss its existence. And once found, how can its importance, as it relates to other things, be thought of as small. As for me, I have to say that this discovery feels like one of the greatest. But of course, each person must find it on their own, and then weight its importance for themselves.
And as for our larger society, I can only hope that it is at last moving past the foolishness of 20th-century intellectual socialism. If it does not, then it remains mired in the dismal conclusion that love is dead, a corpse that we only bring out of the coffin and animate in Hollywood movies to nauseate us all with its hypocrisy. I for one must believe in this rather simple truth: love is real, it exists as a part of our reality, not a contradiction to it. Paradoxes are something that can exist in our head, but paradoxes never exist in reality. And love is not a paradox. Society has been guilty of believing in a paradox (but then, haven't we all at one time or another). It may be hard for some - for example, those most directly affected by the misery communism created - to view this as just a misunderstanding. And it would be harder still to suggest that all foolishness has been forgiven. Deservedly or not, we have been given a second chance to discover - what Christ called - the truth. While I realize that many people feel Christ is an unknowable figure of history, Ratzinger wrote something that made him more clear for me: "Christ never said he was custom, he said he was the truth." And how odd that the ancient word for belief was literally the verb to stand. As distance as Christ may seem, is this message outside of our grasp? For surely only through understanding his message can we believe in the truth it was meant to revel. And I will try to surmise it: patient, enduring love has a hope that is well hidden from casual observation. A relationship exists between the two - and that relationship must be sought to be seen.
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Gabriel Halsmer | Love's Long Absence |